It’s time for Chalica again

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Chalica is a week-long celebration of our Unitarian Universalist Principles. The holiday first emerged in 2005 out of a wish to have a holiday organized around Unitarian Universalist values.

Chalica begins on the first Monday in December and lasts seven days. Each day, a chalice is lit and the day is spent reflecting on the meaning of that day’s principle and doing a good deed that honors that principle. Not all Unitarian Universalists celebrate Chalica, but it has a growing following. There is a Chalica Facebook page, blog, and many Chalica-themed videos on YouTube.

Here is an article from  UU World about it.

This year we will have a daily blog post for all seven days of Chalica. It will include a few activities, a reflection, and a video reading.

Hope you enjoy celebrating this unique holiday with us.

The Sunday of Love

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The Second Sunday of Advent is a celebration of Love. Spend some time today focusing on your loved ones and then focus on how you, yourself, are loved.

You Are the Holiday Miracle by Gwen Matthews

As December opens up before us, we welcome in the gift of reflection. We turn toward our holiday celebrations and search for common threads of meaning.

We begin with Yule, the winter solstice, and we are invited to explore duality, cycles, and seasons, and to witness the Holly King being overcome by the Oak King. Yule reminds us that we all partake in the miracle of renewal.

Hanukkah, the festival of lights, commemorates a time of miracles when the faith of the Jewish people sustained them to reclaim their holy temple and keep the light of the menorah burning for eight days.

Christmas, the celebration of Jesus’ humble birth in a manger, offers us to revisit the miracle of birth and the desire to find saviors to heal the scars of humanity.

Here, in our church, you are just as much a holiday miracle as the turning of the earth, as persistence and dedication to a faith, as the creation of each new life. We see the love you give to others, the space you create to hold one another’s joys and sorrows, and the generosity and spirit you entrust to this community.

You are the holiday miracle. This community is one of miracle-makers.

Glitter Mindfulness Jars

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“When we hear the word “stillness” we immediately think of it as the opposite of movement – but stillness is something quite different altogether. Stillness is an energetic quality of being… Stillness is a choice. It can be felt by living in a state of presence where we remain connected to ourselves and are completely present in our body… In this quality of presence there is something that ‘stands still’, but it is not absent of physical movement. Rather, it is our beingness that remains unaffected by any movement, action or doing even though it moves, acts and does. It is the depth of the ocean unaffected by its waves. It is the ability to surrender to our inner-heart and live from here in all that we do. Therefore, Stillness is not something we have to go in search of nor is it a journey into escapism or numbness. It is where we come from and what we are innately made of and thus it is our natural state of being.” – Serge Benhayon

A fun activity – Make Glitter Mindfulness Jars

Sunday, December 6, 2020: Creating Christmas

Robert

Can you in your Conscience think, that our Holy Saviour is honoured, by Mad Mirth, by long Eating, by hard Drinking, by lewd Gaming, by rude Revelling; by a Mass fit for none but a Saturn or a Bacchus, or the Night of a Mahometan Ramadam? You cannot possibly think so.

— Cotton Mather, Grace defended: A censure on the ungodliness, by which the glorious grace of God, is too commonly abused. A sermon preached on the twenty fifth day of December, 1712.

Christmas is a much loved holiday in the United States, celebrated to some extent by Christians and non-Christians alike. But that wasn’t always the case. For a generation during the 17th century, all celebration of Christmas was banned in Massachusetts, as it had been in England after the Puritan victory in the English Civil War. For a century or more after the law banning Christmas celebrations was repealed, Puritan ministers like Cotton Mather continued to preach fiery sermons against such activities. When Christmas finally returned to respectability it was, we are told, largely through the encouragement of Unitarian and Universalist ministers and laypeople.

Welcome before prelude

Good morning and welcome to West Fork Unitarian Universalists. I’m Robert Helfer and I feel blessed to serve this congregation as a lay leader. I’m glad to see all of you here today.

Thank you for joining us.

Let us use the prelude for centering. We are about to enter sacred time. We are about to make this time and this place sacred by our presence and intention.

Please silence your phones… and as you do so, I invite us also to turn down the volume on our fears; to remove our masks; and to loosen the armor around our hearts.

Breathe.

Let go of the expectations placed on you by others—and those they taught you to place on yourself.

Drop the guilt and the shame, not to shirk accountability, but in honest expectation of the possibility of forgiveness.

Let go of the thing you said the other day. Let go of the thing you dread next week. Be here, in this moment. Breathe, here.

Prelude: “The Sound of Silence”, Simon & Garfunkle

Continue reading →

A Month of Stillness

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“Here are three of my own reasons for practicing the discipline of stillness:

  • I want to maintain perspective. If I don’t make time to be still, then I find myself in reactive mode—influenced by hundreds of little voices with big demands.
  • I want to stay connected to my true self. I don’t want to get confused, thinking that I am the image I present to the world. They are related, of course, but I want to live from the inside out.
  • I want more internal margin in my life. While I have been pursing external margin in my calendar and finances, I also want internal margin—more room to notice what matters most and be thankful for it.” – Michael Hyatt

This month we will be focusing on Stillness in our services and our posts. We will have meditations about stillness posted on Wednesdays and articles/information about the spiritual practice of stillness on Saturdays. We hope you will join us on our stillness journey.

First Sunday of Advent 2020

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This week we celebrate the First Week of Advent in 2020. The Christian spiritual tradition is an important to UU origins and remains an important source of wisdom today.

Light the Candle of Hope

Now the Work of Christmas Begins By Howard Thurman

When the song of the angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flocks,
the work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the people,
to make music in the hear

A Reflection, A Prayer, and a Podcast

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Reflection – Casper ter Kuile -“ life heals life…”

“We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” – Pema Chödrön

Poem/Prayer – A Blessing For One Who Is Exhausted, John O’Donohue

Podcast – Looking Back: Reflecting On The Past To Understand The Present – Hidden Brain